Following a popular trend at the Pope County Library System this year, director Judy Mays, 65, announced her retirement earlier this year and worked her final day at the Russellville Headquarters on Friday. The library hosted a come-and-go reception to say farewell to Mays, the sixth employee of the library to retire this year.

“It’s been about six years since anyone retired. Now all of a sudden this year, everybody is going,” Mays said. “I don’t think there will be any more for a while. We all just got to that point where we were old enough and worked long enough.”

Retiring while she was still able to enjoy her grandchildren was the main reason for her relatively early retirement, but Mays said she’s still having trouble adjusting to the idea.

“I wanted to retire when I’m still feeling good. I didn’t wait until I was creaking through the door,” she said. “... It’s very surreal. Tuesday morning, I’m going to get up and think, ‘What am I supposed to do today?’ But I have grandchildren to play with, and we’re thinking about building a house. ... When we get that done, which will probably take the rest of our lives, I want to do some volunteer work. I put it off saying, ‘Well, I can’t do that because I have to work.’ But there’s a bunch of things I want to get more involved in.”

Mays began working in a library as a change of pace.

“I was offered a job at a high school library,” Mays said. “I was doing something completely different. I had been selling real estate, but I wasn’t doing too good at it. I was offered this job at a high school library and I was like, ‘Wow. I really like this.’”

Four years later, Mays made the jump from the school library to a public library.

“I was offered a job at a public library, which I liked even better, because the people at the public library come there because they want to. It really is a different clientele. I really liked it. I didn’t have a degree so along in there somewhere I decided to go back to school and get a degree so I could work as a director or assistant director.”

After earning her degree, Mays took the assistant director position at Screvin Jenkins Regional Library in Sylvania, Ga., where she worked for 10 years before being hired as the Pope County director in September 2004.

The focus on financial details and managing a full staff were two items Mays said many people don’t know a library director deals with on a daily basis.

“There’s a lot of financial things you don’t even think about,” Mays said. “We get audited, so everything has to be ‘to the penny,’ and I’m the one responsible for that. That’s the biggest thing that surprised me when I came to work here. ... Another thing — I don’t have a problem with my staff at all, but just making sure everybody is doing what they’re supposed to be doing. I don’t micromanage anybody, but I walk through and if anybody is having problems they tell me, and I have to deal with those things. Quorum court (was another surprise.) I’m the one who does that. That was really something new to me, because where I worked before, they didn’t have a quorum court. The financial system was completely different. There weren’t meetings to attend every month. That was something I had to start doing that was kind of a surprise.”

The lack of interaction with the public was also a surprise to Mays.

“You don’t get to work with the public as much when you’re a director, which is not something I actually had in my mind,” she said. “I like working with the public. I love helping people. It’s something that was different that I hadn’t thought much about.”

During her time working in libraries, Mays witnessed a sudden increase in the reliance on computers.

“When I first started, we typed our cards and had a card catalog,” she said. “We would type and file the cards. The computer was an amazing thing when it hit a point where everybody had one, and we had a computerized checkout system. I worked at the Orlando Public Library in Florida. They started a computer system that was really kind of clunky. It had slips and you’d take pictures of the slips and then there was microfilm and you had to read the microfilm to find the overdue books, but it was just amazing at the time. When the books came back, you’d just take the slips out and send them up town. When we got to where we actually had a computerized checkout system, it was just like ‘Wow.’”

Not only have library systems shifted to computer, but the computer itself has become a popular item at a facility once predominantly occupied by printed material.

“Offering computers to people was a huge change. When I first started we didn’t have any computers, so offering the public use of computers was a big boon to libraries,” Mays said.

An even more recent development is the surging popularity of e-books.

“The downloadable books that we get as part of a consortium are really nice,” Mays said. “We were looking at the statistics today. I guess a lot of people got e-readers for Christmas because December went up. We saw a huge increase in the e-books. Audio books are going about the same, but e-books have just exploded.”

Mays said she will most miss interacting with the library staff and patrons.

“The thing I’ll really miss is the people and the staff,” Mays said. “I don’t really see a lot of the public anymore because of what I do. I’ve worked all of my life. It’s going to be a real shock not having to go someplace. I’ll miss coming in and seeing everybody and helping them with their problems and that kind of thing. I’ll really miss that part.”